1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to the field of categorization of items, and more particularly to a method of putting items into categories according to rank.
2. Description of the Related Art
Putting items into categories is a common problem. One example is the awarding of blue, red, or yellow ribbons to State fair entries. The number of entries may be so large that it is impractical to judge them all in one session. Assigning a quantitative score may be impractical in that it may be difficult or impossible to equate numbers to subjective determinations. Another example is an essay contest in which a judge must read and compare each essay. If the number of essays is large, it may exceed the limits of human retention to be able to read all of the essays and sort them appropriately. Also, in situations where there are so many entries as to require multiple judges, it may be difficult or impossible to combine fairly the results of the various judges.
There are numerous other examples of situations in which items must be categorized. For example, organizations typically rank employees as top performers and bottom performers. Professors must grade large numbers of essay exams. Colleges may rank applicants for immediate acceptance, normal acceptance, and deferred acceptance. In technology, suppose a software product has far too many defects to be realistically fixed within a current release. However, the developer may wish to fix the top 30 defects from a huge list having the most customer impact. No single person is able to pour through all the defects on the list and rank them in any practical timeframe.